THE CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS 3D

Werner Herzog is, hands down, the most exciting director working in cinema today. Exciting because he makes connections between emotions, sounds and images that no-one else would begin to think of, let alone have the audacity to put on screen. His films vary from horror to documentary to cop thrillers - that is they vary by genre. But his films are always, everywhere, Herzog - obsessed with the power and cruelty of nature, human nature foremost - and wonderfully obsessed with the power of storytelling - filmed in a kind of gonzo style and yet with perfect control over the medium. For Herzog, mere truth should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story - from a deeper more profound truth. And neither should stand in the way of a lingering shot of a lizard!

Herzog's latest film is a documentary that uses small 3D HD cameras to take us inside a famous cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Ardeche. This cave contains the oldest known cave paintings, beautifully preserved by a delicate ecosystem - so delicate that ordinary tourists are rarely allowed inside. As a result, Herzog's film is the only chance most of us will get to see these beautifully detailed, vivid images. On one level, the documentary is conventional enough. Herzog shows us the paintings and interviews various members of the scientific team, who explain their significance. But nothing is ever that straightforward with Herzog. For he brings with him his childlike wonder at the beauty of the paintings - at early man's use of the curve of the stone and visual techniques to portray motion - and at the very idea that he is sharing a space across time with his earliest ancestors. Who else would see cave paintings and describe them as a sort of proto-cinema, or make a connection between monochrome paintings and Fred Astaire? Some of this might sound hokey, but the sonorous particularity of Herzog's voice and the earnestness with which he delivers these ideas is as compelling as the paintings themselves.

For let us be clear - while this is a documentary - it has the same strange stillness, macabre other-worldliness - as his recent film MY SON MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE?, complete with DP Peter Zeitlinger's tableaux vivants. And even more audacious, the final five minutes are a flight of fantasy, except that the content - too deliciously bizarre to spoil here - really exists!

What can one say but that the Chauvet caves could have been photographed by many directors, and they would have looked wonderful. But only Herzog makes them seem vivid, connected to us, and magical.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS 3D played Toronto 2010 and Berlin 2011. It was released in the UK in March 2011 and will be released in Germany in November. The film is being released in 2D and 3D. to my mind the 3D is more engrossing but the dimness of the image, in an already dim-lit cave, is a deep disadvantage.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?

You go in to a movie directed by Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch with a certain expectation of Weird. You come out thinking, “What just happened here?” You struggle with your own feelings – did you enjoy the film? Is that even a possible outcome here? Maybe it’s just about levels of being unnerved? We’re not in Kansas anymore.

The story is simple enough. Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon – in serious danger of being typecast) is an actor who has become so obsessed with Elektra that he has murdered his over-protective mother. His girlfriend knew he was becoming increasingly unhinged, but the fact that she was with him at all, given his weird emotional tics, shows that she’s no judge of character. But then again, a Herzog film is often peopled with characters who are weird without being sinister – without there being a narrative purpose to it. Udo Kier’s theatre director is certainly strange and bizarre and unnerving, but he’s not actually menacing. The same applies to Willem Defoe’s detective, who appears to be immune to the weirdness that engulfs him, and this immunity makes him as strange as the man he’s staking out. At let’s not even discuss the craziest character of all – Brad’s insane ostrich-farming Uncle Ted (Brad Dourif). It’s as though Herzog is making a point about the inherent oddity of suburban life. Yes, he’s saying, this shit may seem unutterably weird to you viewers, but if you look beyond those white picket fences, this is really the level of oddity on which we’re operating. And that brings us firmly into the realm of David Lynch.

And so you end up with a film that combines both Herzogian and Lynchian strangeness. An obsession with mutated chickens; aggressive ostriches; a random interlude in Peru; and endless tableaux vivants; put us firmly in Herzog territory. The casting of the default-crazy Grace Zabriskie; the inclusion of a milk-sop girlfriend; and the fetishisation of a food; put us firmly in Lynch territory.

How can you respond to a movie in which the plot is propelled by a murder and an abduction, but basically nothing happens? In which every crazy character is trumped by another? This movie isn’t so much an empathetic experience as a spectacle. I still can’t tell you if I enjoyed it. But I know I won’t forget it in a hurry.

Additional tags: Ernst Reijseger, Loretta Devine, Brad Dourif

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? played Venice and Toronto 2009 and was released in Portugal earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and Italy and was released on DVD in the US last week.

Werner Herzog Retrospective 3 - AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

After his gonzo film-making expeditions to the Sahara and Lanzarate in FATA MORGANA and EVEN DWARVES STARTED SMALL, Werner Herzog put together a tiny crew of eight people and headed to Peru to film his hastily written feature, AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD. Starring German actor Klaus Kinski, in the first of a five-film collaboration, this movie is arguably Herzog's most admired and most famous. Viewers have responded to its rough and ready look and the delicious post-modern irony of watching a film about losing your mind in the jungle in the midst of an overly ambitious project being made by film-makers losing their mind in the jungle in the midst of an overly ambitious project. AGUIRRE is arthouse cinema's APOCALYPSE NOW, with an industry of mythic tales about its insane production almost more fascinating than the film itself.

The film opens in sixteenth century Latin America, with a group of Spanish conquistadors looking to claim El Dorado for the Spanish crown. They do so in heavy armour, with canons on rafts, bringing along their women and caged chickens. Don Aguirre (Kinski) leads the scouting party in a mutiny and takes them further into the jungle, into desperation and insanity. As the movie unfolds, Aguirre's pychopathic ambitions become clear: he is murderous and harbours a fantasy of founding a new pure race with his symbolically blonde daughter.

I guess if you were being fairly simplistic about it, you could take AGUIRRE as being a political film about how self-serving and basically dumb the conquistadors were - "Isn't that cannon going to rust?" etc. But I think this isn't really a movie about colonial oppression at all. Rather, it's about a charismatic man who has become untethered from reality in an environment where violence is sudden and anonymous. (Notably, we never see the face of the Indians.) So untethered that he even refuses his own death as a reality. Aguirre is the ultimate exemplar of the Will to Power. And, on an even more profound level, AGUIRRE is the story of Herzog making the film. It is a movie that depicts the folly of making an epic film in a jungle. Who is more crazy: the conquistador taking a cannon on a raft; or Dino de Laurentis taking a crew out to Chihuahua to film DUNE? There are many great films about the film-making process - not least 8 1/2. But typically these pit the artist against the commercial studio bosses, with the added pressures of a wife and a mistress. In AGUIRRE, the line between Kinski and Aguirre and Herzog is blurred. Herzog is pitting the film-maker against nature and the chaos of the void itself.

That may all sound a bit pretentious, but I think it's the only way to approach this film. If you go for a straight reading of the film, you're going to find it insubstantial and poorly made. The visuals, the sound, the hasty framing - it all looks pretty shabby by modern standards - and too many actions taken by the characters seem against character and rather random. But taken as a whole - as an immersive endeavour - the movie just works. And it works not just because you feel that Herzog is going to take it wherever it leads - but because of the charisma of Kinski himself. You watch this German guy which his chiseled features hunkering down in his helmet, looking daggers, scheming and plotting and you can almost feel the febrile insanity of it all. In SUNSET BOULEVARD, Norma Desmond says, "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces." She would have loved AGUIRRE.

AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD played Cannes 1973.

Werner Herzog Retrospective 2 - EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL (1970)

Next on the smorgasbord of crazy in the Herzog back catalogue is his film EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL. Filmed in black and white, on location in Lanzarote, this movie presents a world of midgets in which the inmates take over the asylum and the pristine wards descend into barbaric violence. Thematically, the film reminded me a bit of IF... - another film that scratched the surface of an institution (in that case, the British public school) to reveal the savagery beneath.

Just like FATA MORGANA, Herzog is trying to create an environment that looks alien to our eyes but that contains the savagery of human nature. In FATA MORGANA, he used Africa and in this movie he uses midgets to create that distancing effect. If he weren't such an iconoclastic liberal, and if he weren't known for being so playful, you'd have to take issue with this. I guess his excuse would be that he's only using midgets as a shorthand for weirdness because that's what works for his bigoted audiences, rather than because he personally agrees with such a presumption.

Anyways, back to the film itself. I thought it was a lot easier to watch than FATA MORGANA, partly because there are actual characters with actual dialogue, and partly because it's just a lot more fun to watch a bunch of people go crazy (some of whom are wearing those Fata Morgana goggles), as opposed to some random people wandering in front of a moving camera. It's not so much "fun" as just bizarre and compelling. It's like watching a sort of demented nightmare unwind. Admittedly, it's a nightmare in which a monkey gets crucified. Now, the DVD I watched didn't have a director's commentary on it, which is a shame. But I gather from reading about the film, that "demented nightmare" is the look he was going for. The movie has a bizarre power that commands your attention from start to end. Well worth a look.

Additional tags: Klaus Kinski, Thomas Mauch, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Helmut Doering, Paul Glauer, Gisela Hertwig,

EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL played Cannes 1970 and is available on DVD.

Wener Herzog Retrospective 1 - FATA MORGNAN (1971)

Werner Herzog makes insane movies about insane people. That's the only conclusion I can come to after watching his latest Hollywood-backed release, BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS. This is a movie so insane that it makes everything else Nic Cage has ever done look understated. A movie so insane you can actually see Val Kilmer cracking up on screen. A movie so insane it randomly pauses to give an extended close-up on a lizard!

So I thought I'd take a look back at Herzog's earlier work, which I'm ashamed to say that I have never viewed before, to see how early this insanity set in. First in the DVD queue was his 1971 film FATA MORGANA. Shot on hand-held cameras on location in Africa, the film has seemingly no narrative structure. The POV is of a person randomly wandering through a barren landscape strewn with old car parts and machinery. Local people, kids, drift in front of the camera's gaze and are photographed in a peculiarly objectified manner. Occasionally they wear stylised round goggles. The whole thing is just plain bizarre - a feeling heightened by the eclectic soundtrack featuring a number of Leonard Cohen tracks. Notionally split into three parts: The Creation, The Paradise and The Golden Age, and pretentiously introduced by narrators (including Lotte Eisner) reading from mystical texts, the movie resists explanation. I came through the other end wondering why anyone would actually want to watch such a bizarre flick except as part of a Herzog retrospective.

So then I watched it again with Herzog's commentary. Apparently, the effect he is going for is "political science fiction", in which you imagine what it would be like for a bunch of aliens to land on earth and survey the people. Hence the strange, alien landscape and the curiously objectified presentation of the people in the film. I guess what Herzog was trying to for was some sort of abstract, strangely compelling picture of a planet ravaged by human brutality? Or am I reading too much onto this from his later work? Fans may speak of "beguiling poetry" but I found the movie rather tedious after the first fifteen minutes of interest in the landscape. I tend to think that a movie in which the director's commentary is the only point of access can never be more than an oddity.

FATA MORGANA played Cannes in 1971 and is available on DVD.

Additional tags: lotte eisner, blind faith, the third ear band, jorg schmdt reitwein

Londn Film Fest Day 10 - BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Werner Herzog's remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel flick BAD LIEUTENANT is insane. Herzog is basically inviting us to join with his actors in laughing at the crime thriller genre. To say that the performances are hammy, or that the direction is off-the-wall, doesn't even begin to capture it. Problem is, with everything subordinated to a cheap laugh, there's nothing to hold our attention for the two hour run-time.

The original flick was directed by Abel Ferrara. It was a gritty, sleazy exploitation film about a New York cop strung out on drugs and booze, investigating the rape of a nun, whose forgiveness of her attacker, the cop can't understand. It was down and dirty, sure, but it was serious, after its own fashion. I was expecting a similar tone to this remake. After all, the new flick is written by William Finkelstein, whose credits include NYPD Blue, Law & Order and Murder One. But no.

Nic Cage stars as a corrupt cop, self-medicating for back pain with smack and crack he hustles from people he's taking down. His girlfriend (Eva Mendes) is a hooker, he's running up serious gambling debts, and he's trying to bring down a local drug baron for executing a Senegalese pusher and his family. The cop claims that there's no limit to what you can achieve when you concentrate, which is like a kind of insane joke at the centre of the film. Because just when the cop should be interrogating someone, or investigating a crime scene, Herzog decides to spend a few minutes in extreme close-ups of iguanas set to a hammy version of "Please release me". In one shot, you can actually see Cage in the background cracking up. By the time Cage's character is ruffling the feathers of a "connected" client of his hooker girlfriend in Biloxi, the movie has truly jumped the shark into "just for laughs" territory. I mean, you can admire Herzog's insanity all you like, but what really is the difference between this flick and SNAKES ON A PLANE?

Some reviewers are going to try and sell you the idea that this movie is so ludicrous it's brilliant. Nope. If this were directed by anyone other than Herzog, they'd be calling it an over-long pastiche B-movie and giving it one star. Don't believe the hype.

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF NEW ORLEANS played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2009. It opened this autumn in Italy, Greece and Israel. It opens on November 6th in Romania, on November 20th in the US, on December 2nd in Belgium, on January 8th in Sweden, on January 15th in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, and on March 3rd in France.

London Film Fest Day 10 - RESCUE DAWN

A decade ago, Werner Herzog made an astounding documentary called LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY. It featured an extraordinary and admirable man called Dieter Dengler. Dengler was a small kid in Germany during WW2 and remembers locking eyes with a bomber pilot. From that point he had a passion to fly, and as Germany had no airforce, he became an American citizen and joined the Navy. He was shot down over Laos, taken prisoner, but made a miraculous escape thanks to his own ingenuity but most especially his ceaseless optimism and sheer obstinacy. The documentary was horrific, enchanting, moving, inspiring - everything a film can hope to be.

Ten years later, Herzog returns to this subject with his fictional account of the same story, starring the ever-brilliant Christian Bale as Dieter and Steve Zahn as his fellow prisoner, Duane. We follow them through their horrific experiences, filmed on location and with an authenticity that only Herzog can create. Bale is obviously great as Dieter - he picks up a lot of Dieter's vocal inflections and almost manic optimism. Zahn is an absolute revelation in a quiet, dramatic role, but praise is also due to Jeremy Davies who plays a slippery, hippie-ish POW.

This is a very fine film but I couldn't help wondering why it existed. It puts flesh on the bones of the story given in LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY but actually is only part of the story. The most affecting part of LITTLE DIETER is seeing the impact on Dengler years after the imprisonment. The fact that he sleeps better knowing that he has a fully stacked fridge and supplies under the floor-boards, for example. The first best solution is to watch both the movie and the doc, in that order, to see events re-enacted and then understand the aftermath. But if you are unwilling to commit so much time, I would actually go for the doc for its completeness of vision. This is not to under-sell the movie, but to acknowledge it's more limited field of vision.

RESCUE DAWN played Toronto 2007 and London 2007. It opened in the US, the Netherlands and Israel earlier this year and is currently on release in Finland. It opens in Australia and the UK on November 23rd and in Brazil on December 7th. It opens in Russia on February 21st 2008.

Pantheon movie of the month - LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY

LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY is an outstanding documentary by Werner Herzog. It's outstanding primarily because it's about an extraordinary man called Dieter Dengler. Dengler grew up impoverished and fatherless in war-time Germany and escapes a harsh life to fulfil his dream of becoming a pilot. Consigned to the US army carpool he puts himself through college so he can become a navy pilot only to be shot down in Laos. Imprisoned and tortured by the Cong, he stages a brave escape and is eventually miraculously rescued weighing only 85 pounds and without his best friend. What is amazing about Dieter is not simply that he endures and survives trials that would break most men. It is that he does all this without becoming a haunted and embittered man. He seems thankful and happy for all that he has even in the worst of circumstances. His attitude toward life is admirable and nothing short of inspirational.

Werner Herzog brings empathy to this documentary. He knows what it is to see horrific hunger in defeated Germany. He also know what it is to experience near-madness in the jungle. Perhaps most importantly, he has the arrogance to shape the story to enhance and concentrate its message. For instance, while all the substance and insight is true, Herzog unabashedly stages scenes and rehearses apparently impromptu dialogue. Perhaps I phrased that incorrectly. It is precisely BECAUSE Herzog takes these dramatic liberties that the viewer is allowed to perceive the substantive truth. Finally, of course, unlike Michael Moore, Herzog has the audacity to be quite honest about his artistic shaping of the documentary evidence. And that - the honest artistic interplay with the brilliant source material - that makes LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY - a masterpiece.

LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY was originally released in 1997 and is available on DVD.

X MEN: THE LAST STAND - weak

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is the third installment in the wildly popular comic-book franchise. For anyone who doesn't know, the basic idea is that there are a bunch of people in the world who are mutants, with special psychic or physical abilities. These vary from the rubbish - Wolverine can extend knives from his knuckles - to the aweseome - Jean Grey/The Pheonix can atomise people. The world of "normal" people is understandably nervous at having such powerful people in its midst. The mutants react to this fear in one of two ways. The "good guys" try to control their powers and use them only in ethical ways. They are led by Professor Charles Xavier. But another group, led by Magneto, take a more Werner Herzog view of the world. They believe that the natural order of human-mutant relations is aggression and cruelty. The conflict between these two camps forms the back-bone of every X-MEN movie, usually triggered by some half-assed action on the part of well-meaning but feckless "normal" humans. In this case, the humans have isolated a child who carries a natural antibody to the X-gene. (Whatever. I have not read the comics - the "science" is a blur.) Close contact with the kid cures the mutation and the cure is free for all on a voluntary basis. The feckless part is where the government handily soups up some plastic guns with anti-body darts that disable mutants on impact. Nice.

As with any X-MEN movie, THE LAST STAND is full of high quality action sequences. The final set-piece, where Magneto rips up the Golden Gate Bridge to form a path to the cure-centre on Alcatraz, is inspired. (Clearly, it would have just been easier to take a boat.) We also got some really fine acting from Sir Ian McKellan as Magneto, Anna Paquin as Rogue and Kelsey "Frasier" Grammer as Dr. Hank McCoy a.k.a. The Beast. He's a sort of bright blue Chewbacca character who can kick butt while quoting Churchill. This may sound ridiculous but it is fantastic casting. When Grammer plays McCoy, who is a Secretary of State, he has real gravitas. I also want to mention the inspired casting of Cameron Bright as the anti-body kid, for want of a better phrase. That kid has these amazing eyes and a way of holding his gaze on a person that is unnerving. He is perfect for the role, just as he was petrifying in the Nicole Kidman supernatural thriller, BIRTH.

However, despite the great set pieces and some fine acting, I found THE LAST STAND to be a deeply irritating viewing experience. Why? First, Halle Berry, who plays Storm, is so wooden as to make my coffee table look postively animated. When a close friend dies, her tears are less convincing that a contestant in Big Brother. Second, the script is really trite. Take for example two senior clinicians at the cure-lab on Alcatraz who watch Magneto's army rip up the frickin' Golden Gate Bridge and launch a volley of assaults on their lab. About ten minutes in, one turns to the other and says, "they're coming after us." No shit. Similarly, when Magento unleashes a great evil on to the defenders of the lab, he utters the words "what have I done?" in an entirely unconvincing and out-of-character volte face. More generally, while the script raises some interesting issues about who we class as "normal" and the implications of scientific cures for the "abnormal" - it does so in a really ham-fisted manner. Dear lord, to have Rebecca Romjin sit there dressed up as the mutant Mystique, telling her interrogater that she refuses to answer to her "slave name" Raven Darkholme.....

Third, feminists will no doubt be fuming at the final scene featuring Wolverine and Jean Grey. I cannot tell you why this makes me mad without giving away the plot, but suffice to say that those of you familiar with the etymology of the word hysteria, and the phrase la petite mort (thanks to Katya for correction on spelling), will know why this scene undercuts the PC-ness of having Halle Berry as the chief X-MAN. Finally, the last scenes are completely opaque in their meaning. So the anti-body kid is now a student at Xavier's academy? Has he lost his power to de-X the X-men? We're never told. And as for the very last shot of Magneto, what the heck is that meant to mean?

All in all, the plot inconsistencies, bad acting*, suspect social politics and sheer silliness of the script made this the worst episode of the franchise for me. One wonders if it is coincidence that this is the only one of the three to have been helmed by Brett Ratner (the guy behind those Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan Rush Hour movies). Now here's the weird thing. Ratner took over X MEN 3 after the director of the first two movies, Bryan Singer, dropped out to work on the "troubled" Superman movie. Weird thing is, Singer was taking over from....Brett Ratner. So, if Ratner managed to de-X the X-MEN movies, does that mean that the Bryan Singer SUPERMAN RETURNS is gonna kick ass? Stay tuned to find out....

X MEN 3 is open global release. *Amazingly, I am NOT referring to Vinnie Jones here. Vinnie is actually remarkably good in his role as the Juggernaut. Indeed, he has some of the funniest lines in the film. Which means that not only have I praised Vinnie Jones' comic timing in this review, but I have also, implicitly, claimed that so far this summer, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III is the block-buster viewing choice of the man of taste. Blimey.

GRIZZLY MAN - Best Comedy of 2006!

WERNOR HERZOG is a slighly lunatic genius. He is also Bavarian, but I don't think the two facts are related. In a recent interview with Mark Kermode for the BBC, random kids with rifles started taking pot shots at Herzog and hit one home. Kermode asked if they should stop shooting - Herzog said "it was not a significant event." So, already we know that Herzog is hard as nails. He thinks being shot at is just part of life. It is what it is.

Now, contrast that with another undoubted kook, THE GRIZZLY MAN himself, Timothy Treadwell. Timothy is an extremely camp, self-mythologising, recovering alcoholic and failed actor who has reinvented himself as an ecologist and "kind warrior". Timmy loves Alaskan grizzly bears and wants to protect them. Not for him pragmatic objections such as a) they are already protected in the National Park and b) they might eat you! He prides himself on the fact that no-one has lived longer in the wild and in close proximity to the bears than him. He hates ineffectual park authorites and obese air stewardesses and "the people world" generally. He really does love the bears and gives them cute names like "Mr Chocolate" and "Melissa" and "The Grinch". Treadwell spends thirteen years taking wonderful pictures of these bears and worrying about how his hair looks on film. In order to increase the mythologised picture of himself he pretends that he is camping all alone despite the fact that his girlfriend is filming him on hand held camera. The documentary footage of the bears is great, but not quite as great as the sheer comic brilliance of watching Treadwell ponce around the Alaskan forest like "Big Gay Al" with all his "super little animals." I laughed so hard watching this movie I cried.

In the screening I attended, one women walked out in disgust at the rest of the audience, shouting "It is NOT a comedy." Now, clearly that statement is just pure silliness. The whole point of a work of art is that each person can have their own emotional response to it and each response is equally valid. I laughed my ass off, so for me, clearly, it IS a comedy. Moreover, I would lay good money on the fact that WERNER HERZOG *intends* to take the piss out of Treadwell. While HERZOG no doubt sympathises with Treadwell's untimely end, he delights in pointing out the absurdity and ridiculousness of Treadwell's stance. He edits the 100 hours of Treadwell's footage to give us ample examples of Treadwell's narcissim, and belief that he, alone among all men, was "strong enough" not to get eaten alive. He openly mocks Treadwell's utopian belief that the fundamental state of nature is of harmony and balance. Not only does he interview lots of people who say "I told you so", but he explicitly states in a voice-over that he believes the fundamental state of the world is one of disharmony - of brutality - of violence. He believes that as much as we might find animals cute, animals will view us with at best indifference and at worst hunger. While it is sad when an idiot hippie gets eaten by a bear - it is his own sweet fault. Therein lies the rich seam of black humour in the movie and the source of its greatness.

GRIZZLY MAN premiered at Sundance 2005 and is still on limited release in France and the UK. There is, perhaps bizarrely, no scheduled release for Germany or Austria.